1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a surface-reading apparatus, a subject verification apparatus and a storage medium at which a subject verification program is stored.
2. Related Art
There are cases in which the surface of a subject is read and a characteristic of a surface condition of the subject that has been read is utilized in carrying out, for example, inspection or the like of an article. In recent years, surface matching technology has attracted attention as a technology which can enable assurances of originality of printed materials and prevention of leaks of information.
A surface matching technology is, for example, if subjects are papers, a technology for registering an image of a fiber structure of a portion of a paper at which an original has been printed, the image serving as a characteristic particular to that paper, and when a document is to be matched, comparing an image of a fiber structure of the document with the particular characteristic of the paper to judge whether or not that document is the original.
Because distributions of fibers in paper are random, it is thought that the probability of there being two papers in which the states of entanglement of fibers are the same is extremely small. Therefore, surface matching technologies are considered extremely good as a method for judging authenticity of paper documents.
However, depending on types of subjects, reading the characteristics of surface conditions may be difficult. For example, with a high-quality paper such as a coated paper, because the surface is smooth, it is difficult to read a characteristic of a surface condition as is, and application of a surface matching technology may be difficult.